JD Amer

What you first install on a new computer, I think, is very telling of how you work. My wife and I recently bought a mac book pro, my first mac. That alone swayed some of what I was able to install, but still the choices I made this time around, show a lot about how the way I work has changed from when I bought a new desktop pc in 2006. Back then, the first thing that I would have installed would have been FireFox (maybe Flock depending on how Web 2.0 I wanted to be that day), now I went for Chrome (which is not as nice on a mac) and eventually got around to downloading FireFox. Specific browser aside, the point is that the first thing that I always do is download a better browser than what’s natively included. Safari is actually not that bad, but still the first thing that I do is get a new browser. That, more than anything, seems to be a ringing endorsement for something like Chrome OS… if the browser is the most important piece of software, building around that seems to make a ton of sense.

After I got my browser, my next step was to get a word processor. This is also a big change from the past, but my big focus right now is writing, and not in the sense of writing code. If the word processor was less important, I would probably just use Google Docs (which I used in law school), but I need a more robust application (wait for the irony in my final choice) and so does my wife. So, my first choice was Open Office (which I used in my undergrad days) - which is good, but leaves a bit to be desired. Microsoft Office and iWork are both fine full featured choices and give us everything we need, and we will likely install one or the other eventually. However, somewhere along the way, I started to really get into the idea of full screen word processors, so, I’m now using WriteRoom which is far from feature rich, but a completely addicting way to write. WriteRoom seems to be a favorite for Macs for full screen editors, but I actually like a PC only version of a full screen writer better - Q10 - and it’s actually free… but has no mac version (even says that one will never be built). I’ve definitely noticed an immediate change in availability of free software when we switched to a mac. I think it’s easier to charge for mac software, because there’s less competition so it’s harder for mac users to find free alternatives… that’s probably been the worst thing about switching to a mac.

For code… I still love Aptana and I can get it free, even on a mac. And that’s really all I need at this point, and everything else for me will be done online or with some of Apple’s pre-installed, good enough, software.

Overall, I’m very happy with our mac, but it is a definite adjustment. There’s been a lot of talk recently about iPad and iPhone and support for flash, or support for how code is compiled (bizarre)… and there’s a general sense of outrage, but is it really anything new? As soon as you buy into Apple, you buy into the philosophy that things are going to be done a certain way, and that’s going to be dictated to you. I’ve always thought that it was strange how many of the people advocating an open web, were the same people advocating macs and iPhones. Now that I’m on the mac side of things, I can understand how easy it is to really enjoy working on a mac, the speed and aesthetics alone could win some over for sure. But aesthetics aside, I feel that much of what Apple stands for, in terms of forced approaches, goes completely against how I believe software should work. And maybe that’s just it… maybe the people that are advocating more for cloud computing, and open standards, are doing so, so that they can get around the stumbling blocks of working in an Apple world…

Back in the day, way back in 2005, when I started blogging (April of 2005 if you’re interested), I was much better about keeping up with things on the web. I was also better about keeping my blog up to date. Inevitably priorities shift, the web shifts (I’m not the only one that stopped blogging), and though I’m probably a lot smarter about the web now, I may not be as plugged in when it comes to new startups. I still do try though, even if I don’t keep the blog up to date.

With that in mind, I thought I might share a few things have popped up on my radar that I felt were worth sharing. Some may change the web, some may not, but they all at least deserve a spot on a small blog post of somewhat interesting items, that may or may not be read by somewhere between 6 and 30 people:

Drumbeat: Drumbeat is an interesting idea in that it seeks to leverage the power of the social web to better the web. There are some good ideas for projects already, but I think what’s more interesting is the potential of future projects. With initiatives like the current Privacy Icons and Video Subtitles campaigns, this could be a way that web standards get put into place. It’s not quite a crowd sourced W3C, but it certainly has potential.

Activity Streams and Salmon Protocol: Like microformats both of these are about standardizing data for interoperability sake. Activity Streams is an effort to standardize the way that (primarily) social sites publish data so that data from different sites can be understood and utilized by tools - like FriendFeed or Cliqset - or even the social networks themselves. A lot of the work is around defining verbs - e.g. like or follow - that are common to most social apps. It’s interesting work, and hopefully does a lot for interoperability - I can see where microformats would also come into play on this end. The salmon protocol is similar, but actually does something that I used to really want: it allows you to comment on a post regardless of where you are viewing the post. I used to think that it would make so much sense to add a comment from my rss reader rather than go to a blog post to make a comment. I don’t pull out the old rss reader as much anymore, but I can see this being immensely useful, especially if you think about activity streams. If the two could be combined, then I could use an aggregator to view content from various sites, and the aggregator would understand what it was presenting to me, and from the aggregator would be able to comment on some content - or otherwise interact with it. That’s a major change in the way that the web works - and pretty exciting.

Open Share Icons: After the previous two, this isn’t as exciting for me, but nonetheless, I enjoy the idea of the open share icon, and see it as an emerging standard.

mite: This isn’t really anything new, but I’ve been playing with this time tracking site recently and find it to be pretty useful and inventive. They also seem to have an actual business model, which is nice to see… except that may mean that I stop using it after a week.

Dishizzle: Review sites are a dime a dozen, which is why this one will probably fail. But before that happens, I think you should take a look at this dish review site (as opposed to reviewing the full restaurant, you just review the food). It’s limited to mostly San Diego posts at this point, but it interests me as someone that used to run a local review site. I think this could have been a cool feature - and one that I definitely thought about - but I don’t know that it has real power as a full site.

Well that took a while… no wonder everyone sticks to tweeting.

As someone immensely interested (and involved) in the digital landscape, my foray into a very old medium comes at a very interesting time. It would seem to me that in the digital age, and more importantly in the social age, that my forthcoming novel should not need to have a publisher at all. I should be able to define the business model, publicize like crazy using social tools, and hope to gain enough traction without ever having to use a business model that is forced upon most authors. Saying that, I know the difficult of working independently and not having funding.

But it seems like I could certainly try. If I start with a finished novel (a very difficult first step), then promote it online using social tools, I could drive traffic to a site where I offer the first few chapters (or even 50% of it) for free, as well as some opportunities to get the whole thing for free and the capability to buy a complete digital edition. I would also distribute it through the emerging channels for devices such as the Kindle. Depending on the success (and or failure) of these paths, I would then have it published in an actual tangible format, perhaps using some on-demand printing to not have to pay for unsold books… seems feasible, right?

I wrote some code for the first time in a long time today… well other than the occasional code I write at work. It was fun. I truly enjoyed it, and though it was never employed on a live version of Lopico I really like working with jquery. Today I was prototyping an interface for building out navigation, which I intend to use for something work related, though I probably can’t say much more than that. As I was writing code though, I started to think (naturally) about the unfinished version of Lopico that I started last year. So, I looked at it a little bit, and even took care of a bug. I’d love to get back to Lopico… but it’s probably never going to happen. I’ve decided to limit myself to one outside-of-work project at a time and right now that’s the novel that I’m working on. When that’s done (which feels close, but also really far), I’ll likely work on a new site, but not Lopico. It’s really a matter of finding the right opportunities at the right time. While I think Lopico could still work, I don’t think that at this time, it’s where I would best utilize my time and talents.

Maybe… One of the ideas that I have for a post-novel website is local focused… but it would mean completely scrapping all of the lopico architecture if I decided that was what Lopico would be about. Still local, but with a drastic (less-business) focus. I’m seeing a lot of opportunity in local, but not in the review space. I don’t think that there’s anything on the web that really does a good job of organizing people into geographic groups in the same way that we associate those geographies in real life. If I tell someone that I’m from Chicago, and they ask me about it, I’m not going to start mentioning reviews of restaurants… but there are a lot of other things that I could say and share about the city and specifically about my neighborhood. Hyperlocal, it’s called, but I’m thinking it stretches beyond what we commonly see. I think it stretches into people having a real need to access local information in better ways than what’s currently available.

And there’s something that I want to do with bookmarking that I think needs to be done. Delicious revolutionized the concept of bookmarking (and maybe kicked off web 2.0 in the process), but it’s been more or less at a standstill sense. The way that people interact with their bookmarks is fine, but it could be better.

But before I get to all that… I’ve got a novel to finish (more on that soon).